EXTREME SPOILERS WITHIN
Few thrillers come more provocative than Hard Candy. An internet sex predator contacts a 14 year old girl, the two strike up a relationship, they have coffee, then they go back to his house where he offers to photograph her...and then it all goes wrong. Not that any of what I have described is meant to be 'right, you understand, I mean more that it goes hideously wrong for him. Not only has Hayley (Ellen Page) got his number, but she's set him up to take punishment for his crimes. Jeff (Patrick Wilson) has no idea what's hit him.
The bulk of the film takes place in Jeff's house, and the film revolves around their deadly and often highly painful confrontations. It becomes readily apparent to Jeff that Hayley is no pushover, and their game becomes more convoluted and dangerous until it reaches a nasty yet inevitable conclusion. Kudos must go to David Slade for making the best of a small environment for his thriller. The luxury flat, at first so warm and inviting, becomes a strangely creepy mousetrap that looks oddly beautiful; it glows in the sun, it looks harsh and stark in pale artificial light. Slade does a good job of using the environment and using his actors extremely well. He also treats the subject material with a fairly non-judgemental eye, which makes it up to us to decide truth and guilt. He handles it extremely well, and pulls no punches. What Slade does less well however, is maintain the film's balance. The film seems to recycle itself at least twice; Jeff escapes Hayley's new and devious torture method, he falls flat on his face, she recaptures him, skewers him with wit, repeat. This does take up at least an hour, and it is only in that final forty minutes that things finally become dangerous for Hayley - and the true cat and mouse game reveals itself. Except that you are made to wait far too long.
The odd thing about Hard Candy, perhaps the hardest thing to admit, is that in a strange way you sympathise with Jeff. It is a tribute to Patrick Wilson's incredibly brave performance that the decision to play Jeff as a likeable character instead of as a sleazeball pornographer that makes the revelations of his disturbing sexual tastes all the more shocking. Internet predators don't get their targets by being creepy morons; they are charming and outward. So in a way, it comes off as more realistic. Readers of UK tabloids would love nothing more than to see him as an evil psychopath who gets ripped to pieces by Hayley for his devious crimes, but that is not the point. It is not a wish-fulfillment fantasy for vigilantes. It is a parable about your past catching up with you, that being tortured sometimes is not enough for trying to achieve redemption, that things are never as they seem. It is also worth mentioning that Hayley, played convincingly and effectively by Ellen Page, is not an especially likeable character.
She is a smack-talking teen who often comes off as self-righteous rather than honest; but then again, what do we know? Was she a past victim of abuse? What did she really see in the house? It is interesting that we never actually precisely see any evidence of Jeff's misdemeanours. Then again, he can't be innocent. He did something. She knows he did something, and so does he. The question is: what did he do? It is a very clever premise to make Hayley as unpleasant as she is and Jeff as nice as he is, as it does make you question the nature of truth and who is telling it.
Sometimes, the dynamic does wear a little thin. Hayley's monologues about Jeff's dark side and the evils of child molestation do get a little dull, but for some reason are repeated in different forms throughout the film, as if somehow the audience isn't aware that child molestation is bad (say it ain't so). However, this is the crux of the whole film; Hayley admits that 'Hayley' is a mere mask - it isn't who she really is. So who is she doing it for? She seems bothered by the horrifying things done to the missing girls who supposedly are Jeff's victims, but she didn't know them or seem to care about who they were, though she cares they died. Is she out for revenge? Or just a girl taking on the evils of sexual predators when no others will? Or is she presented as an extreme example of what happens when vigilantes do get their way? She disappears from the film at the end, pretty much unharmed, and we never know anything about her. This makes her a strange and complicated character. It is highly possible she never existed. Did Jeff simply do this to himself?
More complicated is the actual 'truth'. Throughout the whole film, Jeff maintains his innocence. It is only at the end he makes a tearful confession to Hayley. How forced is this confession though? His endless denials of having done anything are met with torture; Hayley will only accept one answer. Did he do anything? Or did he say what she wanted to hear? Then again, if the film had just presented us with an evil sex offender being tortured and a pure innocent girl getting her revenge, it would have been a dull film with no questions asked. It would be bereft of character. It is the inspired writing of the two characters, to make the otherwise morally repugnant individual likeable and make the sweet innocent victim not so sweet, innocent or empathetic, that means we question the nature of the film's reality, of who these people really are.
The film toys with our notions of reality, so that it becomes more than just a claustrophobic thriller. Obvious comparisons are Fatal Attraction, but Glenn Close never cut anybody's balls off (sorry, gave that one away) and Fatal Attraction never suggested to us the possibility that all we saw was made up, or that it was maybe in the head of one or other of the protagonists. It is unique for a film to suggest such a thing. It is a shame that the film itself doesn't always live up to the questions it asks of us. The film's failing is that too much of the film is waiting game and little pay off, and while building up the tension is a good thing, a good amount of this build up is not especially tense. Boredom sets in as Hayley tortures Jeff in more and more creative ways, and your experience ends up oddly neutered. Soon, you just beg for the film to reach some sort of conclusion. Hayley's schemes do also border on the ridiculous, at times reaching Bond-villain levels of ingenuity that makes her a rather less believeable character than we initially think she is.
It's rather hard to recommend Hard Candy to anyone. You don't 'enjoy' this film on any level really. You're not supposed to take any pleasure from anything Hayley does. It's an experience, and not a pleasant one. This doesn't make it without merit though. It's just hard to convince people to watch a film about a child molester getting his gonads hacked off. Since this is all in your face and there is never really any distraction from the action, we have no choice but to watch in horror as Hard Candy unfurls its fairly distasteful subject matter piece by piece.
So yes, good and provocative. Not perfect though, and its true meaning could probably be debated until doomsday.
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